Sharkoon offers up new USB 3.0 host controller card for PCI-E slots

If you are on a computer that is still working well for your needs, you probably aren’t in the market for upgrading to a new machine or mainboard right now. The only downside for lots of folks with older machines that still work well is that the PCs lack USB 3.0 ports to support the new and much faster USB 3.0 storage devices starting to land on the market.

Sharkoon has a new expansion card for PCs that slips into a vacant PCI-E x1 slot. The expansion card offers two USB 3.0 ports and offers sustained data rates of 5GB/s. The host controller card has a NECnPD720200 chip.

The NEC chip allows the device to conform to Intel xHCI-rev0.96 specifications. A 4-pin plug is built into the card for getting power to the USB ports offering power over the network and the card works with XP, Vista, and 7 in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.